Brenda Umutoniwase

Brenda Umutoniwase is currently a doctoral student in the African American Studies Department at Emory University. Prior to this, she completed a MA in Folklore Studies at UC Berkeley and a BSc in International Agriculture and Rural Development with a minor in Africana Studies at Cornell University. 

Brenda’s dissertation project investigates the conceptual problem of what makes genocidal violence thinkable, observable through the persistent incongruence between genocide and blackness. At the MPIWG, she traces this conceptual problem through the notion of space-nature—with particular attention to the historical cartographic invention of the African Great Lakes and the subsequent fictionalization of nature as a technology of annihilation. At the MPIWG, Brenda is also involved with Dept. KSCL's Laboratory for Multimodal History.